‘A belated return for Christ?’: the reception of Arnold J. Toynbee's A Study of History in a British context, 1934–1961

The negative reception of A Study of History at the hands of British historians has masked wider responses to the work in Britain which reflect major tensions within British society and wider attitudes towards the idea of civilisation, the British Empire and religion. The highly critical response to the work from the majority of professional historians reviewing the book is indicative of major debates within British history writing, including the role of empirical and idealist interpretations of history, and the increasingly academic and scholarly role of the historian. Toynbee's position as a public voice and a celebrity historian in the 1950s, whose approach to history eschewed constraints of period or region, represented antithesis to the expanding historical profession and scholarly research. Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History was a weathervane for contemporary cultural and intellectual concerns of the era.     

UNDISCIPLINED AND PUNISHED

The title of Robert Doran's collection of essays on Hayden White proves provocative and evocative. Provocative because it claims to mark a move within philosophy that pivots on the work of Hayden White, and this despite the fact that White himself explicitly resists inclusion within such a classification, that is, as a philosopher of history. Indeed, another contributor, Arthur Danto, had as of 1995 declared passé the whole subfield of philosophy of history. Doran situates White, then, in a niche White rejects and in any case one largely abandoned by those who do academic philosophy. Thus a question that this title evokes concerns why—whatever philosophy of history happens to be before Hayden White—after him it becomes a topic of philosophical lack of interest, one pursued almost exclusively by those not associated with departments of philosophy. Given White's professional travails, his acquaintance with another undisciplined academic, Richard Rorty, and his long‐standing friendship with preeminent philosophers of history such as Louis Mink, one might well assume that White eschews Doran's disciplinary labeling for a reason. In this regard, reframing him as this book's title does invites a worry that, if only unwittingly, the book elides discussion of why certain positions excite not merely disagreement but prompt rather a type of professional shunning. In failing to confront White's reception (or rather lack thereof) by historians and his position (or rather lack thereof) within philosophy, Doran passes over in silence a highly salient aspect of White's work.     

The Passenger Cases Reconsidered in Transatlantic Commerce Clause History

The Supreme Court's 5–4 decision in the Passenger Cases (1849) overturned two Northern states' taxes on poor foreign immigrants. The Court's eight opinions disputed whether destitute transatlantic immigrants arriving in U.S. ports were legally and constitutionally “persons” like fugitive slaves fleeing the South, free African Americans residing in the U.S.‐Canadian borderlands, and black seamen working on ships entering Southern ports. The eight opinions issued in the case, as Charles Warren noted, raised fundamental constitutional questions concerning whether U.S. congressional or state authority was exclusive or concurrent over persons moving in interstate and international business, reflecting wider sectional struggles fostering the Civil War. ¹ More recently, Mary Bilder and others examined connections among indentured contract labor, race‐based American slavery, and the Court's antebellum Commerce Clause decisions to establish that foreign immigrants were commercial objects subject to regulation through the Constitution's Commerce Clause. ² Southerners and Northern pro‐slavery supporters argued, however, that fugitive slaves and free blacks crossing interstate and international borders were “persons” who could be regulated or altogether excluded under state police powers. ³     

THE HISTORIAN AS A PUBLIC MORALIST: ON THE ROMAN ORIGINS OF A SCHOLARLY PERSONA

In her recent book, Virtus Romana, Catalina Balmaceda provides a fascinating analysis of the concept of virtus in Roman historiography. Although virtus, which translates as courage or more generally as virtue, meant different things to different Roman historians, Balmaceda shows that disagreement was never about whether historians should provide readers with examples of virtue. Historians' differences of opinion focused rather on where such models were to be found and what they should look like. This review essay summarizes Balmaceda's main arguments, raises a question about historians' own virtus, and draws some implications from the book for the study of scholarly personae. Did the persona of the historian as a public moralist, such as is known from nineteenth‐century Europe, originate in ancient Rome?     

“The producers on the one side,and the capitalists on the other”: Labor Reform,Slavery, and the Career of a Transatlantic Radical

Abstract

Through exploring the neglected career of John Campbell, an Irish-born Chartist refugee who ascended to a leadership role in the antebellum American labor movement, this article seeks to shed light on how revolutionary upheaval in Europe, debates over immigration, and sectional conflict affected working-class politics. Focusing on the period 1848 to 1851, and tracing Campbell's rapid evolution from a radical opponent of slavery to an ardent supporter of black subjugation, I argue that labor historians need to pay closer attention to shifting local and national contexts to understand the racial politics of labor agitators. Yet even as Campbell's views changed, his commitment to a producerist vision remained constant; by 1851 he had simply added people of African descent to a list of “idle” nonproducers who lived off the labor of workingmen. His proslavery twist on producer ideology suggests historians of antebellum social relations may need to go beyond interrogating the racial dimensions of artisan republicanism to gain a fuller understanding of the variety of working-class attitudes to race.     

HISTORIOGRAPHY: A FIELD IN SEARCH OF A HISTORIAN?

Richard Kirkendall's collection of essays, The Organization of American Historians and the Writing and Teaching of American History, examines the history of the Organization of American Historians (OAH) from its founding to the present, using that history to illuminate how the writing of American history has changed over the last hundred years. The book provides coverage of all the major dimensions of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association's (MVHA) and the OAH's activities, ranging from the work of its scholarly publications, the Mississippi Historical Valley Review and the Journal of American History, to its role in promoting the teaching of American history. Overall, the essays in the volume tell a story of the organization's progress toward greater inclusion and democracy, falling prey to a Whig interpretation of historiography. In doing so, the book is part of a larger tendency in the way that historians have approached historiography, which in turn reflects their ambivalence about their relationship to the historical process. Thus, even as the very enterprise of historiography is premised on the recognition of how historians are themselves the products of the historical process, historians have revealed the limits to that recognition in their approach to the subject. This essay shows how deeply rooted this duality has been in the study of American historiography and illuminates some of its sources by placing Kirkendall's book in the context of how the MVHA and the OAH have treated historiography over the course of the organization's history.     

HISTORY AND KAIRÓS

The recent wave of interest in the “theological‐political” has focused scholarly attention on the constellation of ideas associated with “messianic time.” The term kairós belongs to this constellation, and Giacomo Marramao's brief but ambitious text of the same name both proposes and performs a “kairological” reconfiguration of the close relationship between philosophy and time. Marramao's argument for the productive potential of “cosmic disorientation” and contingency will merit the attention of historians interested in Benjamin's blend of messianism and historical materialism, and of anyone who is intrigued by the prospect of a messianism without apocalypticism.     

The Canadian Rebellion,the American South,and Slavery

ABSTRACT

In the past few decades, thanks in large part to the work of several historians that appears in my edited collection, Revolutions Across Borders: Jacksonian America and the Canadian Rebellion (2019), there is a growing trend to consider the Canadian Rebellion within an American historical and historiographical context. Despite this exciting new research, most studies on the Rebellion and the United States continue to focus on the northern borderland. However, the Canadian Rebellion was a significant event that gained attention all over the United States, including the American South. Similar to the North, the American South was also invested in the outcome of the Rebellion. This was due to one reason: slavery. By specifically focusing on the American South and, more importantly, its influence on American foreign policy during the period, I want to encourage historians to take a more definitive stance; that slavery—just like the Panic of 1837, the Anglo-American rapprochement of thepost-War-of-1812 period, or the fear of British retaliation—played a major role in the United States Government’s official opposition to the Rebellion.     

Reflections on the History and Historians of the black woman’s role in the community of slaves: enslaved women and intimate partner sexual violence

Taking as points of inspiration Peter Parish’s 1989 book, Slavery: History and Historians, and Angela Davis’s seminal 1971 article, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” this probes both historiographically and methodologically some of the challenges faced by historians writing about the lives of enslaved women through a case study of intimate partner violence among enslaved people in the antebellum South. Because rape and sexual assault have been defined in the past as non-consensual sexual acts supported by surviving legal evidence (generally testimony from court trials), it is hard for historians to research rape and sexual violence under slavery (especially marital rape) as there was no legal standing for the rape of enslaved women or the rape of any woman within marriage. This article suggests enslaved women recognized that black men could both be perpetrators of sexual violence and simultaneously be victims of the system of slavery. It also argues women stoically tolerated being forced into intimate relationships, sometimes even staying with “husbands” imposed upon them after emancipation.     

Equal Rights and Individual Freedom: Enlightenment Intellectuals and the Lascasian Apology for Black African Slavery

Juan Antonio Llorente's edition of Bartolomé de Las Casas's writings, Colección de las obras del venerable Obispo de Chiapa, Don Bartolome de las Casas, defensor de la libertad de los Americanos, illustrates how Las Casas was perceived and condemned in the early decades of the nineteenth century. In this article, I seek to explain why and in what ways Bartolomé de Las Casas's early propositions on African slavery played a fundamental role in Juan Antonio Llorente's edition of Colección, an ambitious editorial work that involved much more than selection, editing, and publication. By approaching the Colección's production and reception from the perspective of book history, I explore how Llorente's Colección reflects the role that colonial affairs and race had in the challenges faced by European rule and white hegemony.     

Redrawing the Boundary between India and Britain: The Succession Crisis at Zanzibar, 1870–1873

Abstract

WIDE-RANGING, STIMULATING, AND debatable interpretations of the enforced black diaspora from Africa to the New World are the hallmarks of all of these books, even though they differ in focus and are written by historians at various stages of their careers. Two books contain reflections on slavery and abolitionism by renowned historians of slavery, Gary B. Nash and David Brion Davis. Nash, in an elegant, slim volume (originally the Nathan I. Huggins lectures at Harvard University in 2oo4), returns to a theme he has addressed before, namely the reasons why the founding fathers did not eradicate the blot of slavery from the United States. He argues that action could, and should, have been taken. Davis offers a set of essays - some previously published, some appearing for the first time - that examine the inhumanity of slavery in North America, primarily in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but with a broader contextual and chronological canvas. Tlle three other books are revisions of doctoral dissertations. Eric Robert Taylor and Stephanie E. Smallwood are both concerned primarily with the Middle Passage as a crucial phase of the Adantic slave trade. In Taylor's case, the emphasis falls upon shipboard revolts by slaves during the crossing from Africa to America. Smallwood focuses on the process by which people from the Gold Coast were captured, transported, and fashioned into slaves in the English slave trade of the late seventeenth century. Robert Pierce Forbes's book brings the focus back to the United States and the significance of the Missouri Compromise (a set of congressional acts passed in 182o and 1821) for the political history of American slavery.     

The Penumbral Spaces of Nella Larsen's Passing: Undecidable bodies,mobile identities,and the deconstruction of racial boundaries

Nella Larsen's 1929 novel, Passing, is a psychological drama centering around two fair-skinned women. One, Clare Kendry, passes as the White wife of a financially successful racist; the other, Irene Redfield, is a ‘race woman’ living in upper Manhattan during the era of the Renaissance Harlem. Clare and Irene are undecidables, neither White nor Black, fluid subjects traversing the boundaries of race—passing. Passing is an act of insinuating oneself into forbidden spaces by jettisoning former identities. It is as much a transgression of spatial boundaries as it is of racial boundaries. In the novel Clare passes by merely crossing from Black space into White space, and along the way shedding a Black identity for a White one. This paper examines the mobility of identities across racial geographies and how this movement destabilizes notions of race and of raced spaces.

We encounter the world in our bodies, and through our bodies' most exquisitely sensitive sense, our skins, we take the world into ourselves. We have made and remade a world where nearly every experience is shaded and shaped by the color of those bodies, the tones of those skins. (Jane Lazarre Lazarre, Jane. 1997. Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons, Durham: Duke University Press.  [Google Scholar], Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: memoir of a White mother of Black sons, 1997, p. 94)     

Ethical Responsibility and the Historian: On the Possible End of a History "of a Certain Kind"

In this article I try to answer the question posed by History and Theory's“call for papers”; namely, “do historians as historians have an ethical responsibility, and if so to whom and to what?” To do this I draw mainly (but not exclusively and somewhat unevenly) on three texts: Alain Badiou's Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, J. F. Lyotard's The Differend, and Edward Said's Representations of the Intellectual; Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty have a presence too, albeit a largely absent one. Together, I argue that these theorists (intellectuals) enable me to draw a portrait of an ethically responsible intellectual. I then consider whether historians qua historians have some kind of ethical responsibility—to somebody or to something—over and above that of the intellectual qua intellectual; I reply negatively. And this negative reply has implications for historians. For if historians are to be intellectuals of the type I outline here, then they must end their present practices insofar as they do not fulfill the criteria for the type of ethical responsibility I have argued for. Consequently, to be “ethical” in the way suggested perhaps signals—as the subtitle of my paper suggests—the possible end of a history “of a certain kind” and, as the inevitable corollary, the end of a historian “of a certain kind” too.     

“The Cause of This Blackness”: The Early American Republic and the Construction of Race

Abstract

Race is routinely defined as “socially constructed,” from which it follows that there was a time before its construction. What that time looked like, and how Africans were then viewed by white Americans, is difficult to perceive from a vantage point within the paradigm of race. This essay considers important but neglected cultural referents to argue that a binary distinction between black and white did not emerge on theoretical grounds until the 1780s, when Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia shrewdly redirected growing challenges to slavery into quasi-metaphysical reflections on the gulf between whites and blacks.     

Risk Management Strategies Among African-American Slaves at Locust Grove Plantation

African Americans faced a variety of risks under the institution of slavery. The theory of risk management is used as a context for understanding the lives of slaves at Locust Grove Plantation in Kentucky and for deconstructing the common myth that slavery was unusually mild there. African Americans used a diversity of means at Locust Grove to cope with risk, including generalized reciprocity, food storage, religion, and strong kinship/community bonds.     

1. INDIA IN A WORLD: DILEMMAS OF SOVEREIGNTY

Azfar Moin's The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam prompts a consideration not only of the histories of Islam and early modern connected histories of Central and South Asia, but also of current debates about local and global history‐writing. Moin's work intersects with a strand of comparative world history—following Victor Lieberman's Strange Parallels—but also engages strands of historical anthropology, bringing to light a range of compelling stakes for global historians, historians of South Asia, and scholars of nationalism alike. Though Moin's work pushes the boundaries of connected histories centered on South Asia, his focus on a trans‐regional millennial science avoids questions of the local within new global histories.     

A TREASURE TROVE OF CHRONOLOGICAL LEARNING

The recent facsimile edition of Henricus Glareanus's Chronology of Livy, prepared by Anthony T. Grafton and Urs B. Leu, provides access to a primary source that is unique from the point of view of the history of science and scholarship and of the book and reading. The basis of the edition, a copy of Chronologia annotated by Glareanus's disciple Gabriel Hummelberg II, now preserved at the Princeton University Library, serves scholars both as a point of departure for outlining hypotheses on the teaching methods of early modern humanists as well as the role of chronology in the humanist curriculum. My reading of their edition is based on three points. First, I put the primary source of their choice in a context that includes provincial early modern educational centers as I believe that their enterprise could clear the way for future narratives on forgotten scholars who dealt with the issues of technical chronology. Second, I show the importance of Grafton and Leu's thesis on the procedures of transmission of teachers’ commentary, which, according to them, is documented by the Princeton copy of Chronologia. Third, I argue that the seemingly conservative decision to publish a paper edition of an annotated volume at the moment when state‐of‐the‐art digital tools for such editions are being tailored through the alliance of scholars and IT specialists should open a discussion among historians of the book and reading, science, and education that would lead to the determination of standards for scholarly editions of libri annotati.